Journal of Southern History

Smell, like any other sense, can be racialized. Andrew Kettler's The Smell of Slavery: Olfactory Racism and the Atlantic World, standing on the foundations of work by scholars such as Mark Smith, Alain Corbin, and Constance Classen, offers an intimate journey through the way odors became sites for both creating and reinforcing racism. Kettler argues that the seeds of olfactory racism began "in the body" and "emerged" in linguistic discourse used to justify and maintain Atlantic slavery and that this process began earlier than previously believed (p. ix).

In four meticulously researched chapters, Kettler outlines the creation and durability of olfactory racism from the early modern era to its continued pervasiveness in the present. The first two chapters describe the mechanisms that Europeans used to create fragrance hierarchies and an imagined discourse of [End Page 519] racial odor inferiority. The final two chapters explore the reality of the olfactory environment and the ways that Africans, both enslaved and free, actually experienced odor.

The first half of the book examines the ways that Europeans used odor to craft a false narrative of difference. Here, Kettler tracks the ways that ideas about fragrance and cleanliness were placed on Black bodies. He then explains how this connection later served to foment a burgeoning discourse of scientific racism. Essentially, European noses were creating olfactory racism even before such a nomenclature existed. Kettler notes that Europeans taught themselves that the odor of Blackness was inescapable, inherent. It could not be washed away. To perpetuate this narrative, Europeans had to ignore African olfactory realities. Olfactory racism depended on a carefully crafted false consciousness that erased the relationship of Africans' lived experience with their olfactory environment and their cultural notions of odor and cleanliness. Kettler adds that enslavers reinforced this olfactory racism by controlling the bodies and odors of enslaved people.

The final two chapters use both African and European accounts to show how enslaved and free Africans understood and used this system of olfactory racism. Working within the existing system—yet also apart from it—Africans used European disgust and fears of racialized odors as a way to carve out "spaces of freedom" (p. 160). Redolent spaces created boundaries and allowed enslaved Africans some elements of agency. Kettler describes how enslaved men and women overtly odorized their homes to keep their enslavers away. In a nod to James Scott's "weapons of the weak," these sections especially bolster historical understandings of the sensory tools of power and resistance used by enslaved people (p. 30).

The Smell of Slavery is a welcome and necessary contribution to the growing field of sensory studies, and it is also an important addition to the historiography of the Atlantic world. Kettler's anthropological reading of sources is enthralling. He carefully reconstructs an olfactory past that enhances and complicates our understanding of how categories of difference came to be. At its heart, this book is about the power of odors, both real and culturally imagined. Smell has always been a site for othering and encoding difference. In the end, Kettler shows the pervasiveness of this discourse of olfactory racism. Its underpinnings are persistent, and its stench remains even into the twenty-first century.